Dec 3 Day 7: Lehava, Poland - Jaimie Novick

We had a late start of 8:30am this morning as it was Shabbat - this was bliss for us. We had a quick breakfast and walked to the shule in Krakow. We split into our family groups and Yigal told us an engaging story about a man who thought his family was killed in the Holocaust and ended up finding his son in a shule in Jerusalem. The man had thought that his son was shot in the Children’s Forest, but since the child was so small he managed to go unnoticed and crawl out and escape.

We then walked to lunch and listened to some stories from Mrs Steinman and Michi Weiner which made us laugh and also gave us an opportunity to think about our Judaism in a different way.

Next we went on another walking tour of Krakow and visited the small part of the Ghetto Wall that was left. We learnt that the Germans intended the shapes of the wall to look like tombstones, but the Jews associated it with representing the Ten Commandments. We also visited Schindler’s factory which was interesting to everyone on my bus as we had watched the movie ‘Schindler's List’ on the bus on the way to Krakow, and were familiar with the story. It showed us that people can change, as he was a member of the Nazi Party, but ended up saving more than 1,200 Jews.

In the cold snow, we walked to the town square and had a magical Havdallah, where we all sang and came together as a year group. After the long day of walking, we felt like our toes had frozen off, so we were overjoyed to see the buses ready to pick us up to take us to the hotel.

We ended the day with a quick dinner and an early night ready for the early start the next day!